Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
In Paul Dano’s new movie Swiss Army Man, Dano plays a man stranded in the wilderness who comes upon a dead body and uses its rather unique properties in order to get himself home. The dead body is played by Daniel Radcliffe, and its gaseousness and rigidity below the waist become plot points/jokes throughout the film. And yet somehow still Radcliffe probably won’t be the creepiest part of the movie, because his co-star will be Paul Dano, our finest off-putting actor currently working in film.
You’d never have expected that Dano would become our finest off-putting actor when he first started out. In his breakthrough film, L.I.E., Dano plays a young teen who finds himself mixed up with his hustler best friend and a pedophile. Dano won an Indie Spirit Award for his performance and became a young actor to watch.
It wasn’t until the 2004 Angelina Jolie thriller Taking Lives that Dano dipped a toe into the world of creepy weirdos. In that movie, he played the teenage version of the film’s psychopathic killer. Good start! From there on out, it was a succession of antisocial teens (Little Miss Sunshine), hippie burnouts (Taking Woodstock), and skittish inventors (Knight and Day). But it wasn’t until Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that Dano’s particular appeal was properly defined.
The most striking thing about Dano’s Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood is the utter incredulity that the film holds about how anyone could follow this preacher at all. It’s madness. As Eli, Dano is outwardly insincere, obviously manipulative and dishonest, and most of all completely unappealing. A squealing, sniveling creep for Christ. His expressions, his sliminess, the squeakiness of his voice, the sense that he’s this runt playing dress-up, all of it designed to repel. The rage that Daniel Plainview feels for him comes in large part because it’s this shitty little creepy child who’s gotten one over on him. It’s a great performance that sometimes gets mistaken for a bad one because of just how little Dano cares about whether the audience will accept his particular charisma.
And so the roles went from there. A weaselly convict in Cowboys & Aliens, a callow and selfish writer in Ruby Sparks, a monstrous slave owner in 12 Years a Slave. A movie like Ruby Sparks — which is more daring than you’d think when it comes to sexual politics and the male gaze — completely doesn’t work unless Dano is willing to fully commit to undermining the audience’s inherent support of a protagonist.
Even in movies where he’s not exactly playing bad people, he’s still the guy that awful things happen to. In both Looper and Prisoners, Dano suffers horrifically, and in both those films, his performance is almost aggressively inviting to the audience. NOW he’ll let you in. NOW he’ll get you to feel what he’s feeling. As an actor he’s almost malevolent in his ability to fuck with an audience. It’s gotten to the point where he’ll play a character who dresses up like Adolph Hitler in Youth and nobody blinks an eye. Like, yeah. It’s Paul Dano. Obviously he’s going to dress up like Hitler.
Which is why a movie like Love & Mercy works so well as the exception that proves the rule. Dano’s Brian Wilson is a good guy, with a good heart and a brilliant mind. That mind ends up isolating him from his friends and loved ones, and maybe for the first time since L.I.E., Dano (and director Bill Pohlad) makes the choice to let the audience in with him in a way that will actually build sympathy. And even in this case, anybody with any sense of Dano’s past work is going to be a little guarded around his Wilson. Which also contributes to the film’s conception of the man and his genius.
I’m happy we have a Paul Dano out there, utterly unconcerned and often antagonistic to the idea that the audience should like him. Let the audience sympathize with the Daniel Radcliffe corpse. That’s what he’s there for. Dano’s here to weird you out. Thank goodness.
